Naming Alfred: Chasing the ghosts of historical memory

By Alan LittellSpecial to The Spectator

Tuesday

Sep 4, 2018 at 12:22 PMSep 4, 2018 at 12:22 PM

In Act Two of his great play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare famously put the question, “What’s in a name?” That was 400 years ago. He was talking about roses. If we fast-forward the Bard’s query to 2018 and relate it not to a floral arrangement but to a place called Alfred, New York, the answer has to be uncertainty and confusion.

Wellsville? We know about Wellsville. A tip of the cap to someone called Gardiner Wells, an early settler. Hornell? A tribute to George Hornell, an industrious miller. Bolivar? A paean of praise for the South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar, when exploits like his were much in the news. Belfast? A touch of nostalgia by settlers’ descendants for a bit of the old turf, present-day capital of Northern Ireland.

But Alfred? Despite the yards of commentary written about village and town, we don’t have a clue — or at least a clue we can bank on.

Here, for example, is Cortez Clawson, onetime Alfred University librarian, writing in 1926: “The town of Alfred was named after Alfred the Great….It is reported that some English…travelers visiting this territory and noticing its…resemblance to the country about Stirling Castle…named it Alfred after the sovereign of England.”

Nonsense. Alfred was hardly “sovereign of England.” He was a 9th-century tribal chieftain who held a provincial patch of south-of-England real estate and took the title of “king.” As for Stirling, it was gateway to the Scottish Highlands. The castle and surrounding countryside lay close to 400 miles north of Alfred’s stronghold.

Then there’s this by a former president of the university, John Nelson Norwood, from his 1957 history of the school, Fiat Lux:

“(One) tradition credits the name to a group of English travelers who fancied seeing some resemblance between the local (American) scenery and that about King Alfred’s old capital, Winchester, and so christened the spot.”

Doubtful. Visitors who tramp the gently rolling landscape of southern England — an upland of hills that stretch to the horizon like long, low waves about to break — will find little to remind them of the wooded ridges and deep river valleys of New York’s Southern Tier.

But Norwood also cites a tradition purporting to explain the Alfred identity that at least touches on the possible. The village and town, he writes, may have been named “for the would-be scholar, King Alfred…by the English nobleman who bought the area from the Phelps and Gorham land company.”

That particular nobleman, we now know, was one Sir William Pulteney. He is remembered today as the English grandee who, in 1792, obtained a major interest in the million or more acres of Western New York Indian territory that had come into the hands of the land speculators mentioned by Norwood.

As noted in a 1997 research paper by Susan Strong, former associate provost of Alfred University, Pulteney was a Londoner with ties to the old English resort getaway of Bath. The town was — and is — a spa celebrated from antiquity for its warm mineral springs.

In Pulteney’s day, Bath would have been not much more than a long day’s coach journey from nearby Winchester, ancient seat of Alfred’s Wessex. Nine hundred years before Pulteney, Wessex was the small, backward Anglo-Saxon principality whose Germanic dialect would ultimately morph into the world language we know of today as English.

There is no question but that Pulteney would have been familiar with the cult figure his country idealized as Alfred the Great. Although the long-dead warrior overlord had ruled at a time when the map of England looked like a jigsaw puzzle of independent fiefdoms, historians generally agree that the cyning, or king, of the West Saxons, through his military exploits and revival of learning and of law-giving, laid the groundwork for an eventual unified English kingdom.

Pulteney knew all of this. Said to have been one of the wealthiest men in the British Empire, he was the 5th baronet of his line and a friend of the historian David Hume and the economist Adam Smith. And like any aristocrat with his particular upbringing and education, he had imbibed the national story with his morning porridge. The exalted name of Alfred may well have leapt to the Briton’s pen when Charles Williamson, the young American agent who acted in his behalf, registered title deeds to local townships carved out of the far larger tracts that Pulteney had earlier acquired.

Can we prove it? No. According to Alfred University’s Strong, the first recorded reference to the actual naming of the town was contained in a series of historical articles written in 1881 by Jonathan Allen, second president of Alfred University. The articles said nothing about the role Pulteney or Williamson may have played in the naming of Alfred.

Strong quoted Allen as recalling “those early times when towns were born…faster than the (New York State) Legislature could furnish names for them.” She went on to report that the identification of Alfred was — again in Allen’s words — “given by the Legislature to this town, March 11th, 1808, and for which a large Legislative committee stood sponsors.”

Who served on that committee? Why did the group settle on Alfred? How did it justify the name? What, if any, was its connection to Pulteney? Had in fact such a committee even existed?

We will never know. A fire at the state capital, Albany, in 1911 destroyed all extant records. No written document dating from the early 1800s survives at town, county or state level. A 1941 writers’ project on place names, funded by the federal government, concluded that “constant research and exhausting every possible effort, fails to disclose why and by whom (the township) was named Alfred.”

So where does this leave us? Exactly where we started, with the couplet spoken by the doomed Juliet in Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

And thus it is with Alfred. Regardless the pedigree, if we were to call our village and town Valleyville or Churchville or Collegetown — take your pick — this lovely glen in the far western marches of the State of New York — with its pair of colleges, its equable climate, its historical grounding and its friendly people — would still remain, certainly for this writer, a fine place to live.

Alan Littlell is former travel editor of The Sunday Spectator. Laurie McFadden, Alfred University archivist, provided research assistance for this article.

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